India Knight on porn and violent sex becoming normalised

[ARoombaOfOnesOwn]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/porn-survey-2019-how-internet-pornography-is-changing-the-way-we-have-sex-9qsg6n8kv?shareToken=1d1ddc2ec31b494b86904b6af4299371

Apologies if this has already been posted. It’s from a couple of weeks ago so I hope the share token still works. I thought it was a great, though horrifying, article and articulates what a lot of people talk about on here.

Interesting article. I believe her. I find it frightening and sad.

I watched Europhia with Ds1 and we found it hardcore.

Thanks Roomba. India Knight has done a good job. Like her, I feel torn between the belief that consenting adults should be free to do what they want and my worry about the effect of widespread access to violent porn. There have been a few threads here about the use of ‘rough sex gone wrong’ defences in murder trials when the forensic evidence seems totally at variance with consensual sex.

I think we do need to think more about how to challenge this.

Good but extremely depressing article.

It reminds me of this article:
bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/8/e004996

Young women report that more than half of them either find anal sex does nothing for them or is actually painful; young men report expecting to have anal sex, and expecting it to be painful for their female partners, but expecting to go ahead anyway.

There are countless women (and many men) realising the damage that porn does - especially to our children. But tackling it seems to be almost impossible.

Oh dear God. As mothers if sons and daughters we have to take the lead and teach our children that this is wrong, on all levels. I am depressed to think young women are being forced to consent to anal sex and that society has normalised this. Why are we not allowed to shout No! This is not normal and it is not OK. And neither is porn. But I was depressed that the other woman in the article in the Times thought porn was empowering. Sometimes I despair that we really are back at Feminism 101.

Well said Annasgirl, I agree

This is vile and very depressing.

She is absolutely right, at least from what I, and friends of mine, have been hearing from our University aged daughters.

Some boys don't understand boundaries, Some girls don't understand either, so are not willing to weigh in to back up their female friends.

I think historians will look back one day and look at the decline in religion and of the values formed by close knit societies. They will see young people looking for the norms by which to live their lives and turning to the internet, pseudo "woke" religions where ideological conformity is enforced by shaming, bullying and doxxing, and to peer groups where heavy drug/alcohol use may or may not be the norm.

The "parents", and by which I mean us, University authorities, politicians and more, are too frightened to stand up and define and enforce boundaries. We because we are totally shocked that we have turned into our parents and deny things like TWAW or that anal sex is a reasonable expectation. Theresa May for not reining in the vile Penny Maudant on GRA reform, Vogue magazine for not giving a damn about the safety of young female readers, Bristol University (and others) for taking away hall wardens at a time when the City is awash with drugs, putting in gender neutral toilets, and not protecting women from bullying, rape crisis centres for seeking to hire males, Girl Guides, NSPCC for not getting that fetishism at work is not "normal", Stonewall for pushing the interests of one group whilst ignoring the needs of others, and so on.

There is an epidemic of anxiety amongst young people. Stripped down I think it is that they don't understand the "rules" and that those around them don't either. They don't feel safe, physically or psychologically.

YEs annasgirl my only hope was that India’s article was so comprehensive that hers looked really flimsy in comparison, like “porn, yay!”, that I hope anyway reading wouldn’t really be persuaded by it.

*anyone

we really are back at Feminism 101.

Yes we absolutely are

Good article - thanks for the sharetoken.

That gives me the horrors, as the mother of a 14 year old dd I am dreading her going on dates. Why has the world became so much more grindingly awful for women ? I despair.

Good article. Utterly depressing subject matter. I'm so fed up and angry at this new normalisation of violence against women.

I wonder if it's a backlash against domestic violence laws. They're not allowed to thump us anymore but dress it up as sex and hey presto, it's open season on women again.

In the US, after 30+ years of talk radio and its children, like Breitbart.com, a significant minority of the population lives in that fantasyland.

After some 25 years of widely and privately available porn on the internet, a significant number of people who absorbed that shit think it's real.

It's almost like what we see and hear all the time has an effect on us. I'm sure that comes as a huge surprise to advertisers who've been throwing money at repetitive messaging for decades, while too many people nod along to the notion that, of course, it has no effect because everybody can tell reality and fiction apart.

There is an epidemic of anxiety amongst young people. Stripped down I think it is that they don't understand the "rules" and that those around them don't either. They don't feel safe, physically or psychologically.*

Great insight Needmoresleep. I think you're right.

Society is failing young people by letting them be 'brought up' by the Internet and on the Internet, anything goes. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle so I think the only way to put those boundaries in place, so children and teens receive a consistent, counter picture of how to live well, is through schools. But I don't think academic teachers should have to deliver such courses. Government needs to give more time over to the non-academic in the school day- being the last institution with common ground that people will attend before they're in the adult world. Those courses need to be run by people who have an understanding of child development and behavioural science. In my opinion, which could be naively formed.

This is just horrific - how quickly norms have shifted and how unsafe sex now can be for women and girls.

Agree Mner2019
I am in my fifties. My eldest dd is 14. When I was 14, the only times I heard anal sex mentioned was in grim “jokes” about gay men . By the time I was leaving school, the majority of my friends were still virgins. A few had started relationships that year, three are still with that first boyfriend. Anal sex wasn’t something that boys expected as their right. It wasn’t something they even thought of, no-one I knew was asked to do this until we were much older, by which time we were old enough to say no. I have only had two partners, and was a virgin until I was 23, I have never been asked to do anal, I would have refused point blank but it hasn’t been an issue. One of my close friends tried it in her early thirties, hated it, said no in her next relationship.
So for my age group, it was a niche activity, and now, with porn, it has become something that boys and men think is normal, everyday sex. Also choking, choking ffs !
My age group also started becoming sexually active a little bit later, not everyone obviously, but the majority. That also helps in terms of being a bit more confident in saying no to things and not being as easily pressured. Coercion must be a factor in this . Girls and women being made to feel that this is absolutely expected of them.

I feel that any gains we have made in terms of equality have been overtaken by losses socially. Sometimes I feel that my Mum, a teenager during the war, twenty something in the 1950s, had a better experience overall than my daughters will have. That feels v bleak.

There feels far more hatred for women now. Why is this ? Do boys feel more entitled to things now that there are less social constraints ? I think that shame and judgement being seen as negative plays a part. Men feel unashamed by sexual behaviour that would have been widely condemned. We have a sexual predator as president of the US. Not a new thing, but a much more openly paraded thing. We have men at Pride parading fetishes in front of children. We have Peter Tatchel, a man who thinks sex between an adult man and a nine year old can be fine, taken seriously and listened to on matters of women’s spaces. 

There is a still an enormous difference between how seriously a woman in her fifties is taken, see Julie Bindell, versus a suited and booted man of the same age.

Plus the trojan horse of transgenderism, destroying feminism and women’s rights from the inside.

This feels like a very rough time to be a young girl. I haven’t talked to my daughters about porn yet, but obviously I will have to have that conversation. I hate the fact that I need to talk to them about what the boys they date might be watching.

Sorry long post wittering on ! Just thinking about it all this morning, not terribly clearly.

I sent DH the sharetoken for this article. We discussed it this morning and he said he found the whole article depressing, but what most shocked him was the high % of young people consuming such extreme content.

Interesting that she said she was pro porn in a liberal way. 1. Yet another example of how terrible postmodernism (what in the US and thus social media way be called 'liberal') is. 2. Might be a template on how to change attitudes. She changed, can that be replicated?

Don't apologise for the long post SirVix. It seems really important to acknowledge that progress in equality for women has been uneven.

There feels far more hatred for women now. Why is this ? Do boys feel more entitled to things now that there are less social constraints ? I think that shame and judgement being seen as negative plays a part. Men feel unashamed by sexual behaviour that would have been widely condemned. We have a sexual predator as president of the US. Not a new thing, but a much more openly paraded thing. We have men at Pride parading fetishes in front of children. We have Peter Tatchel, a man who thinks sex between an adult man and a nine year old can be fine, taken seriously and listened to on matters of women’s spaces.

I think this is a big part of the problem. We’re all trying so hard/under so much pressure to be tolerant and woke that frankly deviant practices are mainstreamed. Even calling choking etc deviant is seen as judgemental these days.

I blame the 60s. The 60s generation shaped our media and culture, and are still very powerful. There was genuine cultural flowering and liberalisation in the 60s, but it was on male terms. Women went from being penalised for any pre-marital sexual activity pre-1960 to being told they were frigid unless they fulfilled all their partners' sexual demands (with an overlap period of 20 years when they could be penalised for both at once, as it wasn't till the 80s that pre-marital sex was universally accepted in the UK).

Simultaneously, any form of censorship became A Bad Thing. Mary Whitehouse was the perfect useful idiot for the 60s generation as she embodied all the negative characteristics censorship now represented, being small-minded, homophobic, judgemental and - of course - female. It's easy to laugh at her and the Chatterley trial stuff about 'not wanting your wife or servants to read this book' and, of course, a lot of the pre-60s censorship had been about reinforcing a patrician status quo. But it did not follow that all censorship was bad. Censorship is also about having appropriate boundaries. I don't want to return to a world where my husband decides if a novel is too racy for my delicate sensibilities, but nor do I want a world where men feel it is OK to watch porn on their phones on the Tube and teenage girls are choked and fisted

The 60s media generation are endlessly self-congratulatory about the liberation they achieved, but in fact it was a liberation for men (the 70s women's liberation movement happened separately and in the teeth of opposition and mocking from many of those liberal men). The 60s media generation created a world where - far from being empowered - women are not allowed to assert any boundaries, even the boundary about who is a woman.